


Starstuff

by kittydesade



Category: Darkangel Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-22
Updated: 2010-12-22
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:47:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittydesade/pseuds/kittydesade





	Starstuff

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallbright](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallbright/gifts).



The world, as it happened, was full of empty spaces.

Aeriel was still learning to master the Ancient language and already she had learned to walk between the strands that made up all the world. It was the first thing she had learned, needing to know something that at least gave her the illusion of walking beyond her duties and her studies. The pearlstuff in her blood was silent when she stilled the world and stepped between the firebeads. The only unease that nagged at her was that Erin could not follow.

"I don't mind," her dark shadow pointed out. "It gives you time to think over what you've learned."

Aeriel suspected she meant it made her less broody, but Erin would never say so in words. Her friend had a way of easing burdens Aeriel herself had only ever glimpsed out of the corner of her eye before they loomed, massive and insurmountable.

It was good to have a friend like that here, now, where the task before her of reshaping the world loomed, massive and insurmountable. One such mountain to climb was enough.

She stopped at a place where the light curved on an edge and pulled out a strand of firebeads, examining them. Her lips shaped the words for the shapes they made, or at least, the ones she remembered. There were so many names. So many words that it seemed impossible her mind could hold them all.

 _You will remember,_ the pearlstuff in her blood reassured her, now that she had stopped. _Soon you will know these words so well that you need only look at the shapes and know what they are._

Aeriel had her doubts. But they were beginning with the simplest of patterns, with two and three and five beads each, and that was something.

"And from this, I am to make a world. I might fashion people of my own, or change the ones here, if I wished."

She said it out loud to hear how ambitious it sounded. Even with the limited knowledge she had already the yawning chasm between patterns of five beads on a string and all the things that made up a person seemed greater than ever. Perhaps because of what limited knowledge she had. Just enough to know how much she didn't know at all.

 _You are to heal the world,_ the pearlstuff corrected. Ravenna's voice. _The making of a world is an even greater task._

In her mind she saw the world, she thought, as the Ancients saw it. Gray and pale and lifeless, with the promise of life in the shimmering sands. The vision of the world of the Ancients that the pearl had shown, she remembered, was like that. Like and not like. That world had been visibly destroyed, ripped apart by the wrath of beings too magnificent and arrogant to realize the depth of their own destructive powers. Like the Lorelei, in a way. Too convinced of their own beliefs to see their world dying all around them.

Ravenna, she reminded herself, had been part of that. Even her, who resided in Aeriel now, if only in small.

The pearlstuff was silent when she thought that.

"A little humility is good for you," Erin commented later that evening, walking up from behind her and peeling a fruit for her supper. "It keeps your feet on the ground and your eyes where they should be."

"And keeps you mindful of your shadow?" Aerial asked, smiling. "Without you, I think I would have gone mad as the Lorelei already."

Both Erin and the pearlstuff, it seemed, gave her a sour look for that. And yet Aeriel felt it was true. Languages and words she could barely comprehend in their symbols, let alone their meanings. A crown of light and a blade that caused no pain, only heat and a slight sensation of loss as the skin parted. A garment spun of duty and sacrifice, these were not things that had made up her life until Irrylath, and it was not what she had wanted for herself after all was done. Making a body anew, so neatly that the person living within it never noticed until told there was a difference.

"You're thinking hard thoughts again," Erin said, and pointed a finger at her. "You should rest."

Aeriel looked around their new home and saw all that they had built, then looked down at her hands. That had been built by someone else, an Ancient, another person from another world long ago. The idea that she had been at least accustomed to if not comfortable with seemed too big for her mind to hold, now.

"You're right," she whispered, her throat swollen around the words. "I should rest."

Erin threw her arm around her friend's shoulders and steered her to a place where she could lay down. It wouldn't help, entirely, but it encouraged her to set aside the working and the study for a little while and close her eyes, and sleep. She could still sleep, she found. She still needed it. And she was almost glad, in a way. If she had remained awake all those hours while Erin slept out of necessity she might have started to go mad already.

"Aeriel," Erin murmured, feeling the tension in the other woman's shoulders. "Let it go."

"It's hard," she whispered back. "I can see so much of the world, so much more than I could before, and ..."

"Let it go."

She wanted to tell her everything that she saw. She wanted to make Erin understand, somehow, that everything was connected from the smallest part to the largest, a grain of sand so much like a lon in construction that it would be a simple matter to turn one to the other, except she didn't know how. And when she realized what she was thinking she didn't know how she ever knew it would even be simple. And how her thoughts could chase themselves in circles like a bird, never lighting on one thing but one thought leading to another and exhausting her in endless repetition and curiosity. The pearlstuff only provided answers to the questions she could form in her mind, it did not give her the knowledge, yet, to ask more questions.

And it did not yet give her the understanding that filled the holes in her heart where she knew madness or world-destroying arrogance might creep in. It did not help ease her heart in the least to know that the information was there, should she choose to make use of it. Nor the knowledge that she would have to make use of it, one day.

But not this day. Nor yet the next. For now, Erin was right, she could let it go, and sleep.


End file.
